“Forgive me father for I have sinned.”

“How long has it been since your last workout?”

“About a month.”

“Oh.”

Between my skydiving trip at the end of October, being gone for a good chunk of November, and then being sick all last week after I got home (seriously just the most annoying head cold that leaves me functional enough to do most things but exhausted with a hacking cough by the end of the day) it’s been about a month since I last lifted.

I’ve always believed that the difficulty in getting started again is directly proportional to how long you’ve been out of the habit.

Incidentally, I think the converse is also true. It’s very easy to keep up the habit of working out once you’ve been doing it routinely for a while. Habit completely abdicates the need for willpower, motivation, or whatever you want to call it.

So, what do you do and how do you to it to make re-entry more successful and easier?

The single biggest tip is to do way less than you think you should. If you have a workout plan or program do the whole thing, but cut your sets and reps down by half or two-thirds.

You’re probably a little detrained, so whatever you do is going to feel harder than it would normally to begin with so this makes it a bit more manageable.

Plus, you’re inevitably going to get disproportionately more sore and beat up from a first workout back than you normally would. Doing way less helps to mitigate this so that you’re ready to go the next day, or the day after if you alternate days, rather than being so sore you have to take more days off thus interrupting the return to the habit.

Finally there’s a mental benefit to easing back in with something much more manageable. It’s a lot easier for it to feel like an easy win than if you try to struggle bus through something you really need to be trained up for. You can build on the easy win to get back into the habit.

In a distance second place, the other thing that can help reintegrate the habit is to plan out your workouts. If you were in the habit before there’s likely a specific time or routine where your workout existed, say on your way home right after work. More than likely, since you fell out of the habit some other things have swallowed up that timeframe and now it feels like you have to find new time for the workout – when it was there all along.

Know what you’re going to do (you do have a program, right?), and when you’re going to do it. Put it on your calendar or your to-do list or however you manage things you don’t skip out on like dates, appointments, and meetings.

I’ll be back to it at 2pm today, doing Bryan and Scott’s bodybuilding programming. How about you?

A literal frame is an enclosure that helps focus and direct your attention. The Mona Lisa might lose a bit of her gravity simply hung on the wall as bare canvas.

But when it comes to creating something, a frame only limits and stifles you. The frame tells you what you can and can’t do so at best you’ll reproduce a variation of what has come before.

Here’s a frame: fitness guy you should stick to writing about fitness. No thank you, I reject that frame. Personally I don’t find fitness interesting enough to be the only thing I write about. In fact, I think most people vastly overcomplicate it. Fitness is an important aspect of physical and personal autonomy, but as I see it (exceptions for strength sport hobbies etc) it’s a means to even greater ends.

Everywhere you look there are frames. Go to school, get good grades, get into college, graduate, get a job, retire comfortably. You can accept or reject that frame, but if you’ve been paying attention at all I think you’d agree that frame is broken anyway.

Frames also appear as models, scaled reproductions of things that necessarily leave out details and complexity present in the things that they’re made to represent. Our current model for health is to ensure that some blood values are in specific ranges. Think that might be missing something?

Frames and models virtually guarantee that you miss something, in fact in most cases that’s exactly what they’re designed and intended to do. And that can be useful as a starting point, or as one view of interpreting the world or a system. But when the frame becomes the replacement for viewing the actual system you’re doomed to fail.

I’ll close with another fitness analogy.

Few who actually know the sport would dispute that the era of Arnold, Ferrigno, Katz, Columbu and company were the glory days of bodybuilding. Through trial and error and what would now be considered broscience these men created some of the greatest physiques of all time.

But only recently have we really modeled and understood (in a limited way) the mechanisms of muscular hypertrophy (see Schoenfeld, et. al.). In theory, having modeled out what is needed to grow muscle should have allowed us frankly to create more muscle and therefore greater bodybuilders. But it hasn’t panned out that way. So even though that information is academically interesting and potentially useful, having a frame hasn’t materially impacted the outcome and in fact may have worsened it.

Because things are always more complex than the model.

I’d encourage you too to reject the frame.

My gym has two quotes on the wall. They represent in their entirety all of the sort of motivational or inspirational fare that exists in the gym.

At first glance you might think that they are intended to be motivational, which I guess is possible if you’re the type of person to get fired up for a deadlift PR by an Einstein quote.

But they’re not. Rather they’re a restatement of our philosophies and a reminder of the core tenets.

The first is an Einstein quote, “nothing happens until something moves.” This of course has been used endlessly as motivation to spur action, but to us it means something much more fundamental. We believe that movement itself is truly one of the core functions of a human being and there aren’t many problems that can’t be solved by movement. In a pretty well-known Ted Talk neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert argues that the reason for our big brains is to control movement. Can you believe that? It’s not to recall movie quotes.

Which is to say, if one of the primary functions that led to the evolution of these giant brains is movement, maybe should do more of it?

Of course with anything that we find is true it scales up and down. In other words movement is usually the answer in matters outside the body: quit your job, change your career, move to another city, move on a project and so on. And we get there by just starting anything moving.

The second quote is a little more exercise specific to us.

“Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

First of all I think it’s important to know that the quote itself doesn’t appear in Machiavelli’s writing, and it’s certainly not from The Prince as it’s usually attributed. Instead, there’s a passage in Discourses on Livy that it’s probably paraphrase from.

In this passage, Machiavelli criticizes Romans’ religion as asking man to have strength simply to suffer rather than doing something about the circumstances, or “think more of enduring their beatings than of avenging them.”

A lot of fitness religion revolves around suffering, it seems purely for the sake of suffering. It can’t be for any other reason because you don’t need to suffer to get better.

I’m more interested in what you can do with the strength you develop in the gym. Honestly, who cares what you can do IN the gym? What can you do with what you develop in the gym, outside the gym?

Hike? Move furniture? Play with kids? Bike? Take stairs two at a time? Play sports? Not have your back hurt?

Whatever you like to do there’s a good chance that a little bit of work in the gym will help you do it better, and there’s no suffering required to get the body to adapt. Bodies do that even if you don’t want them to, so all you have to do is head in the right direction.

I got to thinking about these quotes because we’re going to be launching a new program for new people at the gym and I was thinking about how I’d explain things to someone new.

I think it’s good to have some anchors like this to your core philosophies, things that you can reference back to and check decisions or choices against.

These are some of ours, what are yours?